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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2023

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  • It’s really not difficult. You made a statement that stated that you believe that there is consensus, so presumably that means that you know where that consensus exists, therefore provide a link to it. If you cannot then you cannot make the assertion that consensus exists, because by definition it doesn’t.

    Your entire argument rests on the basic idea that there is a scientific definition for consciousness and we have a test for if something is conscious or not. There is no test because there is no consensus. It is not possible for you to prove through scientific rigor that you are conscious, and presumably you’re human. So how can they possibly be consensus on something as contentious as artificial intelligence?





  • AIs are almost certainly not conscious but it been a computer is not an argument against consciousness. There’s no reason to believe that you need biological material for consciousness.

    After all humans are primarily made of carbon which itself demonstrably does not think. It’s the structure that’s important and a fair argument could be made to say that the structure of a brain is replicated in software in an AI and therefore the medium isn’t relevant to the question.


  • I’m not really sure what the point of having a conversation about consciousness is. As far as I’m aware no one has ever actually been able to define consciousness in such a way that it could be tested for.

    So how could we possibly know one way or the other?

    Artificial-intelligence systems such as large language models (LLMs) can exhibit behaviour that seems strikingly intelligent. This has led many people, including some experts, to wonder whether these systems could have some form of consciousness

    Oh great so we’ve only just started the article and we’re already mudding the waters. This bodes well. There is no reason to necessarily believe that a system has to be conscious in order to be intelligent. We have multiple examples of consciousness without intelligence (see my fat cat) so there’s no reason to believe that the inverse can also not be true.